Wednesday, June 10, 2009

First posting: intentional states

Hey everyone (anyone?), thanks for reading my first post on this new thing. I’ve been thinking a lot about intentionality and propositional attitudes for the past few months, and the next few posts will be about some conclusions I’ve come to in that time. This stuff was going to go on the Buffalo Philosophy blog, but that stopped existing. This first post might seem kind of simple or boring. Things will get more interesting once I build off of what’s posted here tonight. Leave comments please!

Some prelimary clearing-up of the terminology:

For our purposes, intentional states are mental states that have content: states of mind such as belief, fear-of, trust, and so on. The content of an intentional state is the object that state is directed at.

An intentional state ascription is a sentence whose predicate meets three conditions:
a. The verb that heads up the phrase is a transitive one;
b. The concept associated with that verb is an intentional state;
c. And the object position of the sentence is occupied by a noun phrase or that-clause.

I’ll leave it up to the reader to sort out by the context of use which occurrences of the word “object” below are objects of sentences and which are objects of mental state.

A concept is the way some piece of the world is thought about by a person. I won’t say anymore about concepts right now because there seem to be a lot of conflicting ideas out there about them.

Alright, then:

What I’d like to begin with is an argument that the objects of at least some intentional states are not determined by the concepts possessed by the person subject to that intentional state. To begin with, notice that at least some intentional state ascriptions tolerate quantification into object position. The inference from “I see Mark Twain” to “There is something which I see” is a valid one. In normal contexts, a variable bound by an existential quantifier can be specified by any phrase with the same extension. So, any term coextensive with “Mark Twain” can be substituted for “Mark Twain” in the above intentional state ascription: “Samuel Clemens”, say.
But maybe the utterer of “I see Mark Twain” has never heard the name “Samuel Clemens”, or believes they are two different people. It still follows that there is something he sees, and that something is Samuel Clemens. So, the object of an intentional state is not determined by any concept the speaker may associate with the phrase in the object position of the ascription of that state.

Edit: "noun" in condition c for intention-state-ascriptionhood became "noun phrase".

2 comments:

  1. I follow and agree until the very last sentence. You say "the object of an intentional state is not determined by any concept the speaker may associate with the phrase"--surely the "any" is far too strong here and there is no way that this can be true of the object of every intentional state.

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  2. I think I meant "there is an intentional state the object of which, etc...". I just wanted to say I had produced one. Fear of bees and trust in one's parents are a few more.

    In fact, I think that the only intentional states that are individuated entirely by concepts are de dicto propositional attitudes. Is that what you had in mind?

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